If you read something new every day, you’ll never run out of ideas to write about.

2) Get Into the Habit of Taking Notes

We take notes on just about everything we see around the web. Different folks on our team have different systems, from Evernote to simple text docs, but everything gets dumped into our communal blog-focused Trello board.

Any time we get a post idea, we create a Trello card.

When we see something around the web that’s relevant to a post idea we’ve been thinking about, a note gets added to that card.

Taking Notes

This helps us think about different perspectives and ways to make blog ideas better, and sometimes it changes the idea completely.

3) Talk to Your Customers

Ultimately, we all write for our customers. Or at least for the people who might one day become our customers.

If you’re doing customer development and talking to your customers — and you absolutely should be — then you’ll probably hear a lot about the different problems and challenges they’re facing, even when those challenges aren’t necessarily related to your app.

For example, when I talked to our customers, a lot of folks mentioned that our homepage video got them interested in trying Groove. They wanted to know how we made it, and how they could create a good explainer video, too.

By talking to our customers and solving problems for them — even if those problems aren’t related to Groove — we build deeper relationships with people and make them more likely to want to do business with us.

Our customers (and their challenges) will always be a huge source of content ideas for us.

4) “Copy” What’s Worked for Others

I don’t actually mean you should steal people’s work. That’s not cool.

But you can learn a ton from seeing what works for other blogs, and then putting your own unique spin on it.

I really like BuzzSumo for this. You can enter a domain, and it’ll show you what the most shared URL’s from that domain are.

So, for example, if you were interested in writing about content for startups, you might enter “groovehq.com/blog” into BuzzSumo, and you’ll get:

BuzzSumo Results

So now that you know that these topics resonate with people, can you offer an interesting, useful and unique take on any of them?

Now, what works for others won’t necessarily work for you. And simply writing about a topic isn’t enough to make a post a success.

But this is a great technique for building a list of vetted blog topics that you know people are already interested in reading about.

5) Do Keyword Research

To me, content marketing isn’t about stuffing keywords into a post.

I don’t like to play that game. First and foremost, content marketing is about delivering value to people, solving their problems and building relationships.

But doing keyword research is a good way to come up with ideas for the types of problems people actually want you to solve for them.

To do this, I sometimes start with a general topic I’m thinking of writing about. For example, remote working.

I head over to KeywordTool.io and type in the topic. The app spits out a big list of the different Google searches that people do that relate to remote working.

6) Scan Social Media, Forums and Other Online Communities

If you know your customers, you probably know where your customers hang out online. Who their influencers are, the types of forums they frequent, what communities they’re involved in.

Those communities can be gold mines for blog post ideas. All you need to do is look at the types of questions that keep coming up.

One trick that works well is to go to reddit and find a subreddit that’s relevant to what your blog is about. For us, an example would be /r/entrepreneur.

Next, do a search in that subreddit for “how do you” — this will bring up a list of posts where people are trying to learn new things or solve challenges.

Hacking Reddit Search

Instant blog post idea for a post about fear. Addressing those burning issues is a clear win, and it also gives you a great place to come back and share your content.

7) Do Stuff That Other People Are Scared to Do

People love reading about things that they’re scared to try themselves.

It’s human nature; before we try something risky, we want to know whether it worked for someone else first.

By taking those risks yourself and then writing about them, you get double the benefit: the upside from trying new things that could potentially grow your business, and the thought leadership that comes from writing about it.

People like to read about these things because there’s a good chance they have to do them too. So if you can help people improve the way that they do things (even tiny things), or cause them to look at those things differently, you’ll add value to their lives.

10) Repurpose Existing Content Into Different Formats

Another big “myth” that I hear from a lot of people is the belief that once you’ve written about a topic, you file it away and never write about it again.

Sure, you could do that, but frankly, it’s wasteful.

And you’re doing your readers a disservice.

Different people like to consume content differently. Your Ultimate Guide to SEO might be really valuable to people who read it, but others who prefer lists and slideshows might never read it, even though they could benefit from it tremendously.

By taking a key point from a post and using it in other posts, you can repurpose existing content by simply reframing it.

For example, take our “You’re In” email that we send to every new customer.

By discarding an idea every time you write about it, you rob yourself — and your readers — of massive potential value.

How to Apply This to Your Business

If coming up with ideas is what’s standing between you and executing on a content marketing strategy, I hope this post helps you overcome that barrier. Steal any — or all — of these and pretty soon you’ll have more ideas than you can write about.

And even if you’re already blogging regularly, I hope this gives you a new way to think about sourcing and coming up with content ideas to keep your blog fresh, interesting and effective.